There are huge flaws in the art as it is practiced today.
They aren't finding what they're looking for because it IS NOT THERE.
Go to the following site, and understand the gap between the fantastic but invented idea-chasers that are currently en vogue, and the scientists that are taking measurements and fitting the results to known phenomena.
This will change your view of modern science forever, and I humbly assert that it should.
"When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S."
He claims that: all modern physicists are intellectually dishonest; Einstein only conducted thought experiments and GR is therefore unsubstantiated; the author is being persecuted for harboring unpopular ideas. I am not a physicist but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems lacking here.
On a more serious note, the quality of scientific debate on Hacker News is really, really low. Part of it is this community's insistence on contrariness – which comes out in a bunch of weird ways, global warming denialism probably the most prominent – but part of it is a really unattractive arrogant streak which refuses to accept that some issues are just complex. Kind of a Dunning-Kruger effect, really.
Yes debate quality seems to have dropped. A few years ago HN comments would put a scientific article in perspective and add important insights. Now there are tons of comments with questions at a Physics 101 or Bio 101 or Astro 101 level.
While I mostly agree about the contrarian nature of many HN posters, there are more than a few very qualified scientists on HN from varied backgrounds, probably at a higher percentage than any other general online community that I can think of.
Flatline, read the site. Read the links. I would never spam this site with wacked out bullshit. Look past personality here and read the science of plasma and electricity explaining, repeatedly, many questions that the popular hypotheses simply don't, at least not without creating mathematically abstract "things" that "must be there, except we can't see them, or measure them, or even prove via experiment that they exist. Dark matter and energy, for example.
The plasma explainations DO address these things, and to my critical eyes, very compellingly. Just give it your time, and be objectively critical.
The dude thinks neutron stars and black holes are unfindable pseudoscience. You could legitimately claim that there are better ways to interpret the evidence for those phenomena, but claiming that there is no evidence only demonstrates how confused he is about the field.
This site doesn't get past a first-pass bullshit filter, which is why nobody's investing any more of their time on it.
Do you understand how many people come up with "theories" out of left field in exactly this fashion?
People like Galileo? Einstein? Maxwell? Crick? Pasteur?
I apologize for offending sensibilies here. For those that are actually intellectually curious, I ask you to read the data. Read the data. Read the data.
THEN make up your mind.
Every advance in science comes from people who challenge conventional wisdom, but the vast majority of people who challenge conventional wisdom end up being wrong.
I did read some of the page, but gave up after it was clear that he thought his "Electric Sky" hypothesis was an alternative to general relativity. It might very well be one could construct a credible argument in some areas, but look at the wikipedia page for tests of General Relativity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
A new theory can't just provide an alternative to one of those phenomenon or a handful. It must make the same prediction in every single case where General Relativity has been tested and proven right - and then it has to make new predictions where General Relativity will fail. That is the standard by which General Relativity replaced Newton, and by which we would test this if it had any hope of providing a replacement.
It is certainly true that cosmologists are accumulating puzzles and I expect that sooner or later we'll get a new theory that can resolve them. But this theory can't even explain the old puzzles that brought down Newton.
Look, I've been reading the same science you have been for 25 years. I have excitedly followed every development from Hawkings discovery of black holes to Feynmans physics work to all the various string theory, dark matter, red-shift big-bang, etc...
I've been reading the same things as you have. I believed them too, as far as one can without any hard evidence. Even the people in this line of work tell you they have ideas, but few facts. When I found this, it seemed to actually answer, in a lab, no less, some things that common astrophysics can not explain. And it does it coherently, in a methodology that can be observed in a lab.
I love science as much as you guys do, and I think you ought to at least acquaint yourself with the plasma sciences, as they are amazingly explanatory of observed interactions both here and in deep space.
I'm not playing zealot here. Take the info as you will. But when I see a scientific explanation that stands up to scientific-method scrutiny, I believe it deserves to be considered in relation to other hypotheses that claim to explain events in a conflicting way.
You mention that you think EU stands up to scientific-method scrutiny. I was looking through the site and I wasn't able to find any examples of a place where EU makes a correct quantitative prediction about some phenomenon where conventional cosmology is unable to?
Also, how would you use EU to quantitatively predict how the orbits of planets diverge from what Kepler's laws would predict, or how the time measurements aboard GPS satellites diverge from clocks on the ground? Or was the page you linked to wrong in claiming that EU disprove's Einstein's relativity?
I see little actual science on that site. What concrete claims there are appear mostly to be conspiracy theories and attempts at "logical refutation" that are extremely similar to the kind you'll find on holocaust denial sites.
Moreover, the "electric universe" hypothesis is well-known and widely rejected by those with expertise in the subject matter. We should not simply trust extraordinary claims by some shoddy website that does little to establish its credibility.
I clicked on one, and it was discouragingly bad. It pivots on the phrase "as the picture shows…" — which is a hallmark of crackpot claims, from Bigfoot to canals on Mars. The fact that two galaxies appear to be connected by "light" in a photograph is no more evidence that they are actually connected than a photo where the sun blows out a tree's leaves is proof that the sun is a small orb floating a few feet above the earth.
This is my favorite read all week. Thank you! As an "idea writer" with plenty of notebooks around at all times to capture thought fairies, this is a freakin beautiful way to extend that practice and take it to many levels I hadn't even thought about. I will buy this book as thanks to the author and poster-
Cheers-
I like what he says very much. Perhaps his title is a bit incendiary, but the principles he writes on are very lucid, and I found myself thinking hard about them.
Excellent read.
The sentiment is unimpeachable- but the advice isn't.
Get the education, and the perspective that come with it- absolutely. But it doesn't require a retreat to academia for several years to gain it anymore.
The internet is the collective knowledge and experience of all humanity.
To seek this information is wise and wonderful- but I respectfully suggest that dropping ones life to go back to school, chained anew in debt, isn't necessary for the attainment of that wisdom.
I don't see the internet as a source of wisdom, or even knowledge, depending on what one means by the word. Information, certainly. But the mental habits that the internet as a mass medium fosters are antithetical to study and reflection.
I love the internet, not least because of the ease with which I can obtain information that used to take hours in the library. But obtaining specific facts is not the same thing as learning or thinking.
From observing myself and others, I believe that something is wrong. I'm getting way more brain stimulation from the internet than I used to without it, but in terms of things that matter to me in the long run -- growth and learning -- it is of poor quality. I remember the quality of a life spent with books, and this is definitely not it. I feel like I'm experiencing my own atrophy, and it dismays me. Sometimes I think that one of these days I should post a list of books to HN and promise not to come back until I've read them.
So no, consuming information from the internet is in practice nothing like getting an education in the humanities, for anyone whose brain is wired like mine and those of people I know.
It all depends on what you view with the Internet, just like the quality of a life spent with books depends on exactly what books you're reading. If all you read is romance novels, you won't be stimulating yourself adequately; the same is true online. If you choose to access only brief news articles and simulator entries, for example, you may learn a lot; but you won't stretch your mind.
Every now and again read something difficult; something that makes you think and leaves you confused. You'll learn more in the long run. A great place start, if you happen to be interested in math, is Terence Tao's blog, and a number of the blogs he links to. (At the least, I find it challenging; the blog is over at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ .)
This is the sort of platitude that it's comfortable for everybody to agree on: it's just the quality of the material that matters, so just read better stuff. Well, no. That isn't the only thing that matters. The medium also has an effect. The internet is an excellent medium for random access to specific things and a poor medium for substantial thought and reflection. It's a mile wide and an inch deep.
Tao's blog is excellent, but how does one acquire the background necessary to understand his mathematical posts? By rolling up one's sleeves and doing hard work, most of which is likely done away from the internet. And this is the kind of thing that spending a lot of time on the internet makes it harder to do. That's my experience, anyway, as well as my observation of others'.
This post really resonates with me. I feel that the brain suffers without being used as a "memory store" of some kind. Maybe we use the same brain action to access memory as to access thought processes so that without the constant need to access memory we lose the other portion as well.
I am going to follow your advice, disconnect, and try to really understand some books.
I really loved reading this. I'm in a similar boat, though not at the stage of recruiting anyone yet. Let me ask you this though: are you unconcerned about not having people in a face-to-face environment?
I can't imagine working with someone on developing my/our shared passions remotely. Besides, I communicate far better in person. Is that an unusual position to take, in your eyes, or do you just know what you need from a technical standpoint and choose not to worry about personalities etc... ?
37signals have a vast team spread all around the world and they have always said it doesn't hinder them... I think if you believe in the people you are working with the distance soon doesn't matter too much.
The question that pops out to me after reading your request is what is the role of these people? Are you just looking for contract code, or co-founders?
These are two fundamentally different people/groups, requiring two different aproaches during the search for them.
Pursuit of government sponsorship is easier than convincing people to part with their hard earned money by persuasion. A government bureaucrat with a magic bank account called a "departmental budget" filled with other peoples money can be far easier to entice with the latest lame scheme to make the area look good on paper, while adding nothing of genuine utility to the infrastructure.
I agree with the author on this one- it's a waste of money.
But is it "entrepreneurial"?
Yes. Sad, but yes.
My school has recently signed on to one of these programs but through a different company (viaCycle @ Georgia Tech). Basically they're subsidizing their business through students. We already pay for the campus bus system and the school has plenty of bike racks at each building including bike storage rooms and lockers at the dorms. But the alumni who own the company have realized that the school will pay and the SGA will accept it because it makes them look like they're doing something.
There are huge flaws in the art as it is practiced today. They aren't finding what they're looking for because it IS NOT THERE. Go to the following site, and understand the gap between the fantastic but invented idea-chasers that are currently en vogue, and the scientists that are taking measurements and fitting the results to known phenomena.
This will change your view of modern science forever, and I humbly assert that it should.
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm